By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
July 18, 2014

Don't worry, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia would step in if something politically untoward should happen to Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. The former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana is presently the most savvy and professionally articulate economic light in both the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the country at large. And so should Nana Akufo-Addo be humanly rendered incapable of running the affairs of the country, assuming that he wins the 2016 presidential election, Ghana would be in the hands of a far better qualified premier than Messrs. John Dramani Mahama and Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur and, in fact, the best qualified Ghanaian leader in at least four decades.

And so, really, the Enquirer newspaper's dastardly attempt to mischievously stampede Ghana's former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice from the political arena will come to naught (See "Akufo-Addo's Wife Worried About His Deteriorating Health" The Enquirer / Ghanaweb.com 7/18/14). This is at least the second time, in as many weeks, that the Enquirer and its assigns and associates have so cowardly attempted to torpedo the presidential ambitions of the former Akyem-Abuakwa South Member of Parliament. And like the rest of their ilk, this stinky and morally primitive propaganda tripe, too, will not wash.

Indeed, The Enquirer, for those of our readers who may not know this, or may have so soon forgetten about it altogether, is the trashiest of rags, or tabloids, currently operating in the country. And its editors, owners and publishers are of the most reprehensible character. Once, for instance, during the tenure of President John Agyekum-Kufuor, the Enquirer's editor drenched himself and his clothes with tomato juice and claimed to have been brutally assaulted by some supporters of the the then-ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP). It would shortly turn out that the alleged assault victim was clinically suffering from an acute case of schizophrenic dementia. But what was even more intriguing was the fact that the Enquirer's editor had one of the Ahwoi brothers as his charade stage manager.

That Nana Akufo-Addo would choose the most astute Ghanaian economist of his generation and at the moment as his running-mate, twice before and now for the third consecutive time, ought to eloquently inform his evidently stolid detractors and Ghanaian voters at large that Nana Akufo-Addo may also be the best qualified presidential-candidate aspirant in the NPP. One only has to read Dr. Bawumia's 50-page British Council disquisition on the bleak state of Ghana's economy, presented in Accra in March 2014, well before the so-called Senchi Consensus, to either bear out the foregoing observation or objectively impugn the same.

In other words, badly cooking up anonymous sources in a desperate bid to mischievously undermining Nana Akufo-Addo's hard-won confidence with the bulk of the Ghanaian electorate will not work. For not only does it unpardonably insult the intelligence of the well-meaning and thoughtful Ghanaian voter, it also glaringly - and aptly so, one may observe - exposes the Enquirer's editors and publishers for the shameless media quacks and congenital liars that they are.

Interestingly, a similar criminal act of mischief was once played on Akufo-Addo's own maternal uncle, the legendary Mr. William "Paa Willie" Ofori-Atta, by miscreant elements of the CPP-PNP-NDC-PPP-NDP camp. Then also, as now, several of the supposedly healthier prized political horses of the inveterate detractors of Paa Willie pre-deceased the latter by at least a decade. I mean, who has so soon forgotten the tragicomic story of Messrs. Imoro Egala and Nana Okutwir Bekoe?

And you thought these cynical rascals would have learned a lesson or two by now.

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